Morrissey and The 10 Greatest Rock Memoirs

I've been reading Morrissey's memoir, Autobiography, published by Penguin Classics (!) and I have to say that so far it's been pretty great. I'll do a full review when I'm done but what I like about the opening chapters is Morrissey's voice and his beautiful evocation of the Irish diaspora community in 1960's Manchester. There have been several negative reviews of the book, one by Stuart Maconie in The Guardian which I respect and a silly and typically...

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Why I Loathe Downton Abbey

A post from last October when I was living in Seattle and I saw Downton Abbey for the first time on PBS and was somewhat hooked and somewhat aghast...(I'm a lot mellower now, I promise.)...I hadn't seen Downton Abbey until this weekend but I knew it sounded dodgy because The Daily Mail has been boosting it for the last two years and anything The Daily Mail loves is prima facie revolting. The paper who drooled over Hitler until September 1 1939 (and...

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Edgelands

An interesting Edgeland that I saw last month in the Huon Valley, Tasmania:half junkyard, half sheep pastureA few months ago when I blogged about Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways I said that it was almost as if the book was designed specifically to please me (in contrast to much of our current culture which seems to be designed specifically to annoy the hell out of me)...In The Old Ways Macfarlane followed some of the ancient walking routes of Europe...

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In The Morning I'll Be Gone

locked and bolted from the inside...I finally finished the page proofs and copy edits of the third book in my Sean Duffy series In The Morning I'll Be Gone this week. The very last thing I had to do was get the permission of Tom Waits to use a verse from his song "I'll Be Gone" as the book's epigraph. Tom Waits doesn't always give permission for his stuff to be used in other contexts so I was pretty relieved when the rights came through last...

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Cormac McCarthy's The Counselor

in the Counselor people say lots of banal sentences like this (above)convinced that they're telling you the wisdom of the ages... In America Cormac McCarthy is unassailable. He has a cast iron literary reputation, a legion of fans and highly placed champions in the upper echelons of American literary culture. All with good reason. His Tennessee novels are masterpieces and Blood Meridian is one of the greatest American novels of the last 50 years....

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The Not So Simple Art of Murder

I'm reposting this from June of 2009 as what I said then is more relevant today. This year (2013) New York has experienced the lowest murder rate since reliable records began in 1963 and last week there wasn't a single murder in any of the five boroughs. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan this year appears to be fewer than half a dozen. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world (safer even...

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The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)...I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house...

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Hail To Thee Backstroker!

a post from 4 years ago about a problem I still have to this very day......Last year I read a book called The Swimmer As Hero and since finishing it, I've tootled along, three days a week, to swim at the charming St Kilda Sea Baths just down the road from my house. The building is attractive, the staff helpful, the water buoyant. The number of hairy, obese Russian men is higher than I would have thought strictly necessary but the Russian guys are...

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"The Clash Would Have Killed To Have Come From Derry" - A History Of The Undertones

Recent fantastic BBC 4 documentary on the greatest Irish band there's ever been: The Undertones. Working class kids who conquered the charts by crafting perfect 3 minute teen-angst punk pop songs in the middle of what could, with some justification, be described as a war zone...

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Why Reality Shows Are Good For Us

In 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the following letter to Scribner's complaining about the fame he had achieved, compared to the fame of his engineer father and grandfather: "I might write books until 1900 and not serve humanity so well and it moves me to a certain impatience to see the little frothy bubble that attends [me] and compare it with the obscurity in which the better man finds his reward."...It's always a mistake to try to compare oneself...

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Red or Dead

my review (below) of David Peace's Red or Dead in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. It was a difficult review to write as I absolutely loved the book but I felt that I had to warn the casual reader and/or Liverpool fan that this was written in Peace's rather unique style which might, er, drive some people up the wall. Anyway this is what I came up with: ...Clough and ShanklyIn an early scene in David Peace’s new novel,...

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Sheugh Explained

A little video from my stay in Dover, Tasmania where I was ploughing through the page proofs of In The Morning I'll Be Gone and in between rain, hail and snow taking a few walks in the woods. On coming upon a sheugh I thought I'd answer one of the questions that seemingly always comes up at book readings:&nb...

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